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The good news is that Tremors 2: Aftershocks (1996) is better than most direct-to-video sequels. It’s been competently put together, has some decent-for-1996 special effects, and star Fred Ward’s rugged handsomeness has managed somehow to level up. (The short, spiky hair of the first movie has grown beautifully into a shoulder-length mane — he looks like the working man’s romance-book cover model, and the film’s cameras, at one point humorously ogling him while he leans against the table, wink at it.)

But ultimately being better than most direct-to-video sequels isn’t that foolproof a characteristic quality-wise — the bar isn’t very high, after all — and beyond not being irredeemably terrible Tremors 2 doesn’t have too much to distinguish itself from its lots-of-fun predecessor, aside from paling in comparison in basically everything it does while managing to not be horrible. It also introduces a new creature that looks like a cross between the legendarily gigantic worms of the first movie, a rhinoceros, and a dodo bird.

It isn’t specified how many years after the first movie Tremors 2 — itself shot in 1994 — is set. But you can presume it hasn’t been long: one of the new characters, a winsome geologist named Kate Reilly (Helen Shaver), recognizes Ward’s original-movie character, Earl, before she’s even properly shaken his hand. (She saw him once appear on Good Morning America.) We don’t get a proper recap, but the decorations in Earl’s trailer — a worm-themed pinball machine, a collage of framed magazine covers on the wall — tell us what we need to know. After the events of the first movie, in which Earl and a handful of neighbors in barren Nevada battled off a coterie of Titanic-sized homicidal worms, the survivors, namely Earl and his best friend Val (Kevin Bacon, unfortunately not showing up in Tremors 2) became 15-minutes-of-fame-style celebrities. The climax of that notoriety came with a People cover featuring Val and Earl grinning ear to ear.

Notoriety, though, hasn’t made Earl lastingly richer. At the start of Tremors 2 he’s laying low and still trailer-bound, tending to some ostriches he impulsively bought with his remaining worm-related sponsorship-deal money. Almost everyone from the first movie has moved on with their lives in places other than Perfection, Nevada. Earl would probably be OK, if still not quite free of his self-pity yet, continuing with moving on too if, almost immediately at the start of his film, oil-field owner Carlos Ortega (Marcelo Tubert) wasn’t showing up unannounced at his door. (Carlos’ overeager young taxi driver, Grady, played by Christopher Gartin, doesn’t have the willpower to not get out, too; he’s a big fan of Earl’s work, and wants an up-close look at the renowned worm-slayer he’s seen in all those Reebok commercials.) 

Ortega tells Earl that his employers have been getting killed by the very same worms — the public calls them Graboids now — that come to mind whenever Earl’s name is mentioned. He wonders if Earl wouldn’t mind using his expertise to hunt them down. The answer is no until Ortega says he’d be willing to pay Earl $50,000 for every one killed. A trailer and a barely-holding-it-together ostrich farm aren’t good enough dissuasions. 

As annoying here as Bacon was charming in Tremors, Gartin becomes Earl’s new sidekick. He dreams of opening a wormy amusement park, which seems indirectly to suggest that Jurassic Park (1993) doesn’t exist in the Tremors universe. Tremors 2 suffers from the lack of the first movie’s affable good-buddies repartee at its forefront, and also the lack of spark from the new supporting players. In a big step down, the standing-out Reba McEntire is no longer among them, though at least the movie brings back Michael Gross, who played her intense survivalist husband. (In Tremors 2, he’s just as pleasantly eccentric; when he first arrives, he’s crazily grinning, in yellow-tinted sunglasses, with a truckful of explosives.) The first few kills in the movie are a breeze; Earl and Grady have a smart radar- and remote control-dependent setup that keeps them a step (wriggle?) ahead of their wormy opponents. But inevitably numbers start getting too overwhelming for the movie to ward off the ambush-followed-by-final-showdown arc monster movies of this kind all to a certain degree must typify.

Tremors 2 makes all the right moves on the surface. But it never gets into a very comfortable comic groove, and it’s never very suspenseful. It’s hurt, too, by not getting the first-movie benefit of reaping tension early on from not knowing what exactly is going on. There by design can’t be any real surprises — except for when the dumb new creature is revealed — and so we never experience the original movie’s singular way of keeping us on edge while getting us to laugh. It’s not as novel anymore. But it’s never exactly poorly done, either. I’d say Tremors 2 is very not bad. Though compared to the five follow-ups in its wake that I haven’t seen, I’m sure all the exclamations that this is one of the best direct-to-video sequels ever made look less and less hyperbolic.